It’s Oscar season, which means there’s a metric ton of movies — probably good ones — that came out at the tail end of 2016 I didn’t get the chance to see. (Arrival, La La Land, Manchester by the Sea, Hacksaw Ridge, etc.)

But I did my best. What follows is the definitive list of the 10 movies that came out in 2016 that I watched with my entire face and accompanying brain, ranked objectively by goodness.

About halfway through Rogue One, I found myself taking a mental tally, going over the characters I’d met, the events that had already unfolded and the threads and arcs that had been set up, and wondering, flatly, whether or not I loved the film or merely liked it to that point.

While that may seem like a criticism on the surface, it’s really just a testament to the sort of layered, multifaceted film Gareth Edwards has given us here.

Halfway through this movie, I stopped seeing the characters as heroes on the page or screen and started reacting to them emotionally as if they were people – real people I was witnessing endure in the face of overwhelming odds. Despite the film’s flaws — and there are some — it is the characters who push this entry in the Star Wars canon from simply good into the realm of great.

I’ve come across numerous threads — on reddit and beyond — wherein readers have asked fellow Fantasy fans to recommend series either with or (usually) without gratuitous amounts of romance, or, for lack of a better term (and because it’s funnier) banging.

Naturally, this caused me to sit back and wonder where Valley of Embers fit on the scale of romance-full to romance-less, and everything that comes along with that. I realized pretty quickly that Embers is fairly romance-less, and I thought it was strange that I had to think about it for more than an instant in the first place, seeing as I wrote the damn thing.

So, after some thinking, allow me to try to explain why my two co-leads (a man and a woman) do not become romantically involved in the core narrative of the story.